I've never been one for Valentines Day. Nothing personal. Not really. Sure it sucks when you don't have a significant other on the day of love but that is not the end all on why Valentines Day won't make it in my list of favorite holidays. Not that I actually have a list or that Valentines Day is actually considered a real holiday here. The thing is that this is a fluff holiday. It has no real religious ties, national significance and we don't even get to have a day off from work. It's just a self proclaimed event to indulge in fru fru happy feelings like love while inadvertently depressing others.

I expected this Valentines Day to be like all the others in the past. People around me will be giving or receiving flowers. There will gushing. There will be teasing and good natured nudging. Girl talks from several office cubes away will be heard throughout the better half of the whole floor and you are now privy to some girl's relationship. But yesterday was anything but your usual V-day or any day for that matter. Yesterday two bombs went off on a south bound bus that was picking up passengers under the MRT station behind SM Makati. Yesterday people died. People that could have been easily been me. Needless to say I am very much affected by this.

Bombings are not a usual happening here. There have been bombings before. But not like this. Not several explosions in different places in one day. And certainly not in a place I frequent. I'm even more upset about this than the time I rode an LRT that stopped in a station that had a confirmed bomb planted in its premises at that very moment, that bomb turned out to be a dud by the way. I didn't get it. Even after all the news reports of rebel encounters in Mindanao, kidnappings and other terroristic acts, it still hasn't really hit home that we are at war. Until now that is.

The civil war here is something that a lot of people don't feel because it is basically centralized on an island that is far from the capital. We know it's there but it isn't really in the forefront of our minds because we hardly ever have any incident that spits the fact about it to our faces like what happened yesterday.

Well it's on our minds now. For the most part, things have sort of gone back to normal, or as normal as it can get after such a thing. But people are very wary of riding buses. If they do, they refuse to sit at the back. It now resembles a scene in one of those African-American movies that tells about the evils of segregation in buses where people are crammed together in one side while only a few people are sitting the other side. The appearances of sniff dogs are back. Suspicious looks are again given to those who are carrying generic looking plastic bags.

A part of me still can't believe that this happened. I mean this is Makati. I work there. I always hang out in Glorietta on Saturdays when I don't have work. In spite of the whole Oakwood siege last year, I still think of it as one of the safest place to be. It's a bitch to be there when you are a notorious jay walker like am, but that's actually part of why it's safe to be there.

Yesterday I was planning on leaving work early to go to SM and buy that three piece twin bed sheet set that's at fifty percent off. Knowing me and how cheap I could be to myself, I probably would have opted to take a south bound bus under the MRT to go home instead of walking all the way to Landmark to ride an FX. I could have been on that bus.

I guess that's part of what has me all riled up about this. I was saved from potential doom by project issues and caused me to do overtime and effectively prevented me from leaving the office early. It sounds silly and trivial but it makes me think about all the little things we do that don't seem to matter all that much but has the potential to change your whole life. This frightens me because this means that everything we do does matter. I can never know what action will change the course of my life because anything could.